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A Reliable Procedure for Polarity Measurements on Line Arrays

The performance of a line array strongly depends on the correct installation of its loudspeakers. For instance, a single speaker with incorrect polarity may clearly compromise the sound level and directivity of the whole system. The identification of such errors however can be very time consuming. Therefore, it is desirable to have a fast, yet reliable procedure to finding such array elements. This paper presents a step-by-step method to check the integrity of a line array, and to find the cause in case of a polarity problem. Besides the theoretical background, a successful practical case is described.